SPEAKER_00 0:00

And he said, Would you give me a year? Would you consider getting your license? And just give me a year. If you don't like it, if you'd let me know a couple months ahead of time, at the end of that year, you go your way, I'll go my way.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

All right, welcome to another episode of Connections That Matter. We have conversations with Colorado's best business owners, and we find out how they network that have led to their success. Today I have a Loveland, Colorado staple. Uh, if you've lived in Loveland for any part of time, you've definitely experienced the Wheaden Insurance Agency. Today I have Eric Whedon from the Wheaton Insurance Agency. Eric, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Thank you for having me, Andrew.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

All right, Eric. Well, a lot of people who've been in Loveland or have seen year-round or have been networking have seen the Wheaton Insurance Agency. But um share a little bit about the business and uh about you.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Well, sure. The Wheaton Insurance Agency was really started in 1956 when my grandfather Ken moved here from northwestern Missouri. Um he had $200 in cash in his pocket and a handshake deal to go in with the uh oldest real estate agency in town. And he was still licensed and selling life insurance. He'd been selling life insurance for Kansas City Life for years at that point. So he came and continued to sell insurance. So our our agency is now celebrating 70 years under one family's ownership. And about 1960, he bought out the oldest property casualty agency in the town of Loveland, the Cheeseboro Agency, which was founded in 1915. So 111 years for the business continuously. It's just such a rare thing to see a business survive that long, uh, family businesses, especially. But we have a wonderful staff of 14 people there now. We are writing personal lines and commercial lines, life and disability insurance. Um, a little over half of what we do is commercial, uh, really specializing in areas of uh construction-based accounts, hospitality accounts such as restaurants, breweries, bars, distilleries, things like that, property owners who do a lot of properties and lease them out to others, and then other professionals, um, everything from attorneys and accountants and lawyers and things like that. So that's sort of where we're at today. Um, our personalized team really loves helping the full account. We are not an agency that specializes in high-risk insurance or people that really just are trying to check the box to get licensed and get a license plate tag. That's not who we are at all. But if if you are someone who really cares about getting the coverage right, that's where our team excels.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

So uh when you're a little kid, uh your grandpa's doing it, uh, and then your dad makes a decision to do it, and then you and you have a brother, Mark, as well, makes a decision to do it. Um did you always want to be an insurance agent?

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Oh gosh, no. Uh that was something that dad and grandpa did. I was never gonna go into this business. I I had sort of dreams of being like a rock star or something like that. And then I was doing other things. I managed a music store for several years. Uh, I'd gone back to graduate school to study computer information systems. My brother and my dad still call me the nerd to this day. Um, I think mostly because of that. But um, in about 25 years ago now, my dad was asking for help. He needed to fill a seat in our remote birth at office, which we had at the time, which we no longer do, but we got too big for it, if that makes sense. And he said, Would you give me a year? Would you consider getting your license? And just give me a year. If you don't like it, if you'd let me know a couple months ahead of time, at the end of that year, you go your way, I'll go my way, no hard feelings. And so, you know, it's family. And as many of us will do, I will do anything for family and try to take care of them any way I possibly can. So I agreed to do this. And there were times during that first year I didn't know if I'd stick it out. There it's very frustrating walking into a new line of work, and I was in that building by myself a lot of time. So I didn't really um, I had to really start self-mentoring, if you will, by being very proactive about taking courses and meeting as many people as I could and and just trying to figure out how to do this insurance thing. So, but here I am 25 years later, so I obviously stuck it out. I I don't I really, really love what I do today. I am so blessed to work with my family, my dad, my brother. I did get to work with my grandfather until about 10 years ago. Uh that man knew about connecting with other human beings very, very well. And uh the staff that we have today are I've I cannot say enough good things about the people that we have. We would not be in the position we are today if it weren't for the dedicated efforts and smart and hardworkingness of each and every one of our people.

SPEAKER_02 4:58

I think that's you know, you talk about your first year, and it's like, man, uh, you know, you have some good days and some bad days, or uh you learn learn a bunch. Um, but as you've built a successful team now and you're adding a lot of agents, how do you how do you coach somebody to get traction within their first year where it's a skill-based kind of ideal?

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Yeah, there's uh a lot of different ways to do that. You know, obviously with insurance, a large part of it is gaining confidence in what you're selling because we sell uh we sell is a little different from what a lot of people sell. We're selling a promise, right? We're selling a contract. And those are complex legal documents. Most people can't open a policy, start reading on page one, and read clear through the end and really have a handle on what they just looked over. Uh the there's the insuring agreement, there's definitions, there are uh conditions, there are exclusions, there's special limits, exceptions to exclusions, and they all work together in such a unique way that it becomes a uh a jigsaw puzzle in a lot of ways. So for step one is really getting to know um and have some level of expertise there. We encourage all of our people to go and earn a designation of some kind, just so that they can try to build upon that knowledge and have that first obstacle out of the way, which is what am I selling? The second thing that we usually do is we um encourage them and we a lot of times we'll take them along with some more experienced networkers in the office to uh networking meetings of various kinds. Of course, your group being one of the best around without a without question. But if you can take them there and they can start to feel a little bit more comfortable in a crowd, um, it it really can build the growth of that person in terms of them starting to make those interpersonal connections. The third thing we do is we really talk about the uh you you hear it called the form or Ford, depending on who you're talking to. So family occupation, recruit recreation and money for the form acronym or family occupation, recreation and dreams, if you don't really want to talk about money, which I think is sometimes more comfortable. But how do you start to have those conversations and really gain confidence enough to build the relationship? Because when it comes down to this, people have a lot of different ways they can buy insurance. But buying it from someone they developed a relationship with is almost always more rewarding than buying any other way. This has become a key staple of what we do.

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Uh yeah, relationships are huge. And in a networking session, we're gonna see somebody over and over again. Um what when is it like when somebody trusts you enough to have you quote their policies? Is is some people it's like super quick to trust, and others you gotta work and work on them.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Yeah, no, there's absolutely truth to that. Uh, one of the things that I encourage our people that are in these networking groups to do is to try to be consistent. Because you were right, not everyone develops trust right away. Not everyone develops trust at that first smile and handshake and hey, what do you do? Uh, I encourage, once again, our people to play a game at these networking events, which I call let's not talk about insurance.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

And what that simply does is it puts them in the frame of mind where they are ready to ask as many questions about the other person as possible and lead them to eventually gain a level of trust and confidence and relaxation where they suddenly are really wanting to know about you because you've been so engaged and interested in what they're doing. I think it's a great little tool, and I think just about any anyone that's involved in a networking group can really take that and work it from that angle. It's a it's a low pressure way to gain that level of trust. And once they do ask you about it and become engaged, at that point, that's really the time to say, hey, can we get together? Can we get to know each other a little bit? I'd love to learn a little bit more detail about who you are, what you do, why you do what you do.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

Does the weeden name and that you guys have been around, does it assist in that trust happening faster? Because even if they haven't met you, they've probably heard of you.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Yeah, I um I would love to claim that our agency's success and position was so much due to the fine work that I've been doing. It's your name on it, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

That's the one thing to be the Wheaton agency, or that's you, that's you're Eric Wheedon.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Uh I am, but you know, the in the long run, this is built upon decades of work by my grandfather and my father, and other people that have worked with our agency in the past have worked really hard to do it. Now, I will freely admit that my brother and I have put a lot of work in into transforming what the agency looked like over the years. And our father Lawrence is sometimes reluctantly, but usually gone along with it because, you know, change is always hard. It doesn't matter who you are, especially if you're someone like my dad who is so relationship-based. That man has never met a stranger in his life. I know you that's a cliche, but it's honest to goodness truth with that man. He will make friends anywhere and everywhere he goes. And I quite frankly admire him for it. It's it's a very special skill.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Well, they have the statistic that a lot of new businesses fail, or um, you know, running a business is a is a tough thing. You guys have been, like you said, celebrating 70 years. Yes. Uh I would say there's some there's some expertise in longevity. Also, you write policies for very successful long uh businesses that have a lot of longevity to them. The businesses who are built to last, what what are some things that set them apart?

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Well, that's uh that's a great question because we, as we've expanded, uh like all businesses, you experience some growing pains. Sure. Right. Uh when you start off, you're you're literally a one-man show or one-woman show with all the hats. You know, you start off the day as the guy with security unlocking the door. Next thing you know, you might be playing janitor and cleaning the bathroom and and doing every last aspect, whether it's servicing a customer, taking care of a new one, canceling an old one, whatever it happens to be, you do everything. And then even as you grow a little bit, oftentimes you still have to follow that model. Because if you're a small agency or small business owner, one person on vacation doesn't allow your business to stop, right? You you still need to find a way to operate. And what we do, especially, uh, knowing that people are counting on us in some of the darkest times in their lives. So one of the things that we've uh as we've gone through some of these growing pains is we've really started to separate roles in the agency. It used to be personal lines and commercial lines that would be sort of a blur. There might be people that preferred one side or the other, but everyone did a little bit of everything. So we've started to separate out those lines of business a little bit. Now we all work very closely with one another still, but gaining that separation into different departments was step one. Now, step two is really become how have we separated the service roles from the sales roles, right? Because a great salesperson, man, you just hate to hamstring them by saying, hey, I need you to sit at your desk all day long and and and type up ID cards and make these changes. Not that those things aren't important to clients, but man, it just drags the momentum right out of someone who isn't a sales focus, right? It takes them away from being able to go make one more call on someone and develop a relationship further or attend another networking event or or whatever those types of um growth opportunities are where they start to fill their pipelines. So that was really the step that we're going through. We've gone through recently on the commercial side. We are really doing the same thing right now on the personalized side that we're not quite as far along on that. And then the last thing that I think will really help a business in the long run stay in business is start, and and this should have probably been done earlier for us, but sometimes as you evolve, especially a legacy business, you don't always get to start off that way. But is defining uh very clear processes and steps, and that's not to say people should follow a script. No one wants robots, right? If we've got AI to be a robot for you, you've got websites to be a robot for you. But developing those um processes develops a consistency of customer experience. And we find that that becomes a very important thing in the long run. How does the same person or do different people get the exact same experience with our agency in terms of the quality of the service, not in terms of the personality of the individual in the agency?

SPEAKER_02 13:50

When as a as a broker, there's the client relationships, the sales, the the your people that you're serving, but you also are porting different insurance carriers and bringing them in, and there's relationships on that side. Uh I know that you can offer some things that some other people in town don't have access to. Yes. Um, how do you build those kind of upper relationships where you're in a position to uh be able to write specific policies?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Well, in terms of the carrier relationships, one interesting thing about insurance is we are not just selling to policyholders. Many times we have to sell the risk to the underwriter, to the carrier, in order for them to say, yeah, we'll offer terms on this, or we'll offer the most favorable pricing terms on this because of the relationship we built. So relationships there are of utmost importance. And then in terms of getting contracts with these various carriers, and I think many businesses may have this in the form of different vendors that they might work with, relationships are important there as well. Uh early on, I started building relationships with different carriers through my involvement and dedication to our state trade association for insurance, the professional independent insurance agents of Colorado. I would go to their trade shows, their young agents events, no longer young, I don't get to go to those. Uh, their um lunch and learns, their, I joined their board of directors. And time after time after time, I would get invited to these things and I would start learning about a different carrier and figuring out if it was going to fit our strategic plans in terms of growth. Are they gonna help us with products, uh pricing, markets that we don't currently have, that they might be able to do it better? Will it help our clients in terms of choice, which is one of the huge benefits of an independent agent, is we do have choice for people. And can we really bring something of value to the partnership? Are we going to be able to support this partnership in a way that they will feel it's a win, we will feel it's a win, and our customers are under the mindset, man, this is an amazing agency.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Yeah. Well, and you do a lot to promote your, especially for the business of your, like I've seen your community magazine, you have a featured vendors on your website, but it feels like a very conscious choice to give your clients a platform rather than just write them a policy. So share share a little bit your approach to that and what has made that successful.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Yeah, so we about um a little over a year ago, we we decided to do a complete revamp of our social media presence, our website, and everything. And we just we chose to work with a really wonderful vendor. All they do is deal with insurance agencies, but they have uh allowed us to do some really cool things that we really that that have become, I think, um feels almost a little unique when we look at other agencies things there. First of all, we do put out this monthly magazine. So first of every month, you can find it right on our website, weedenagency.com. You can find our community magazine. We include local dates there. We'll include sometimes articles about uh individual members of our staff, things that are happening in the community. And one of the things I'm most proud of is each quarter we partner up with a local nonprofit and we we do referrals for a cause. Uh, referral growth is is the best way for an insurance agency and quite frankly, most businesses to grow. And that's why your networking group is such a valuable tool, is how you help build referrals. But ours is trying to go one step further. Wheaton Agency is the agency with the heart. We have been a part of the community for so many years. And one of the values my grandfather can is really passed down to us over the years is you cannot just take and take and take from a community and be successful in the long run. You have to find ways to give back. Well, we're taking that and finding a way to formalize that relationship that the heart of Weeding Agency is with their community and use it in a way that benefits a nonprofit and can promote that nonprofit and will have a residual benefit of giving us additional referrals. So for every referral that you submit through our website that gets a quote from our agency, we make a donation to the nonprofit of the quarter. I know this quarter is the Laramie County Food Bank. Next quarter is going to be Be the Gift Foundation, which helps single moms with their pairs around the house. But we've done some really wonderful things between the community kitchen, Thompson Education Foundation. Um, we've done the the the um kids pack, and there's a bunch others. And each time we'll do that. So that referral right there, in a way where we're giving through that referral is really positive. The other thing that you mentioned was community partners or or ads in our magazine. So we very strategically try to help local businesses grow. Is it all just our customers? No. Is it our majority of them our customers? Absolutely. But no, not all of them are our customers. I know in this month's magazine, for example, downtown 4th Street is being torn up and really impacting a lot of restaurants there. So we are featuring in this month's magazine three restaurant owners on 4th Street where they're being negatively affected by the construction. And are they our customers? And the answer in this case happens to be no. Not one of them is one of my customers. And yet we're still featuring all three of them because we thought it might be a good way to help give back, help them feel success and feel that the community is out there supporting them.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Yeah, maybe they're not your customers, but they're in your town that you care about and that you're building that community.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yeah, absolutely. And the community is vital. That is a key relationship. Once again, Grandpa Ken talked about um when he was talking about giving back, I think he was talking about it in a lot of different ways. I think he meant give back to your community, the place where you live, give back to your industry, which we've done through our membership and the trade associations and so on. Give back to your family. Be as successful as you possibly can so that you can help support your, your, your family's dreams and hopes and future. Um, I think all three of those things are very valid when he talks about giving back. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Uh people ask you for referrals all the time, right? Like I get a car accident or maybe there's a loss on the house of some kind. And all of a sudden, I need all of these resources that are not part of my normal thing. If I'm going through life, I don't maybe network with a roofer or a plumber. Um, but the first call, I'm probably calling my insurance agent. Hey, am I covered for this? And then, oh my gosh, where who do I call to make sure that it's done right? So, how do you cultivate your recommended uh referral partner list that you're given out when people ask for advice?

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Some of that is developed. That's a great question, Andrew. Some of that is developed on the fly, I'll be very honest, you know, because sometimes someone is asking for a referral that we've just had no direct experience with that particular request. And at that point, we start scrambling a little bit. Who do we know that's doing something like this, could be good at this, and so on. So um in insurance, especially if it's claims related, we have to be a little cautious because uh there are laws about what we call steering in the insurance industry, where we can't, I can't tell someone who they have to use. So we are always trying to provide a list of at least four or five names. Hey, these are four or five names of local businesses that some of our clients have had success with. Um, see who you love. See who call them all up and see who treats you the best, right? This is where that first contact is often really important for a uh business to have such a positive first uh you know, 15 seconds of interaction with them. If you call these people up and it's just, you know, 15 minutes of hold time or uh an an AI phone answer, I do not feel that develop develops or builds any relationship. I think people, especially if they're dealing with a claim, want to feel some empathy. Want to feel like someone's like, oh man, that's just terrible. This happened to you. But hey, don't worry, I got your back. We're going to find a way to make things better for you.

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Well, and one thing I was in the office the other day, and you had recently had a roofing company like presenting to your team, like educating your team, building that relationship and understanding, hey, this is what we provide. So if you can recommend somebody here's that process, what does those bullpen sessions uh look like?

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Well, we we actually do them quite frequently. We usually have one or two times a month that um various vendors are invited into our office uh to tell us about who they are and what they do. And I know my staff is really talking to them in in, they may not ask it directly, but I'm watching the wheels spin in their heads, and they're asking about the quality of the work, of course. What makes you a little different, right? But I see them really evaluating each time is this person gonna be someone that I will be proud to send my customer to at a time of need, in a time of darkness? Um, our our our mission statement is simply this we help put lives back together when bad things happen. I tell our people every month, at least uh two or three times a month, it's a reminder, we are here to provide hope in a time of hopelessness or a light in a time of darkness. And sometimes that hope is provided through us simply having ideas of people they can talk to that can help get them started on their road to recovery from whatever it was, whether it was a car accident or fire or hail storm or whatever else. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

Well, Eric, this has been awesome. Uh, as people are watching the episode and they're like, maybe I need a quote, or maybe I would love to network with uh yourself or one of your agents. Um, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Yeah, I would absolutely love to network with anyone that wants to. I would love for people to reach out to us for quotes for businesses, home, auto, life. It doesn't matter. We'd love to take care of you. Um there are two primary ways. We love knowing our customers, first of all. So we might be a little bit different from many uh insurance agencies out there. We love a phone call from you, 970-667-2145. We do have options if it's after hours and you just still want to get going on it. Our website, weedonagency.com, W-E-E-D-I-N-A-G-E-N-C-Y.com. You can get a quote right there. Um, and if you'd like us to come see you, let us know. Tell us that we are a little unique in that, that we are not an agency. It just wants to crank out uh as many quotes as we possibly can and hope we snag one or two of them. We want to know who people are.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

And if you're networking with your one of your agents, you're probably not gonna talk to them about insurance, is what I heard about.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Uh but not at first, no, but eventually someone's probably gonna ask us.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Yeah, for sure. Well, Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll put all that stuff in the show notes and uh we'll see you around Northern Colorado.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Thank you so much, Andrew.

SPEAKER_02 24:52

Hey all, thanks for watching. I love networking and building relationships with other Northern Colorado business leaders. So if you want to come meet some of these podcast guests, meet me or meet some other amazing entrepreneurs in Northern Colorado. I would love to have you attend one of our next events. Uh, go in the podcast description. There's a way so that you can see our upcoming schedule. And maybe you could be a future podcast guest as well. Thanks.